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Sexually explicit Japan manga evades new laws on child pornography

I.....this...I don't even....

They stare wide-eyed from the pages of magazines, childlike in stature but engaged in extremely explicit sexual activities.
They may be drawings, but critics say the images found on the pages of some of Japan's erotic manga are so disturbing they should be banned.
"I believe that this kind of terrible material is not protected under freedom of expression," says Masatada Tsuchiya, a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
On Wednesday, Japanese lawmakers passed a law that will see people caught with child porn jailed for a year or fined up to $10,000.
However, it doesn't include possession of anime or manga depicting child abuse, no matter how sexually explicit.

The bigger problem, she said, is that manga permeates Japanese culture. It can be seen everywhere, from street signs to government pamphlets.
Often, the characters depicted are young, vulnerable girls who meet consumers' desires for something "kawaii" or "cute."
"'Cuteness is a problem," she said. "Because cuteness is something that makes you feel you have to protect the person, and there's a very fine line between 'I can protect the person' and 'I can control the person.'"
She said the prevalent depiction of young girls, especially in "Lolita complex" material, risks giving "the wrong impression of women."
"If you're looking at it all the time, how are you actually seeing people? Is it just a fantasy, or maybe some people with a bit of a wrong mind think that is actually there, and that is the way to treat women. So there is a risk," she said.

the future is bleak, uncertain, beautiful
tomorrow they might come and arrest us all
only if you listen closely can you hear the machines
beneath the side walk whispering
the machines beneath the side walk are
always whispering
strive to listen close
please, try to be free
don't be afraid
the end of the world will never come

I'll play devils advocate here and say...isn't it preferable for these people to have a relatively harmless outlet for their sickness? Pedophilia is ****ed up, I'm not saying it's okay by any measure. But if these people feel a need, isn't an animated image infinitely preferable to a real life alternative?

Sure you could argue that the same people buying into this stuff are the people going around the law anyway, you could also argue that it is encouraging them...but the small percentage who will buy this stuff in favor of the illegal alternative seem to be worth considering leaving it alone...

I dunno. Pedophiles are always going to exist regardless of the law, giving them this option seems the least harmful way of dealing with it.

I'll play devils advocate here and say...isn't it preferable for these people to have a relatively harmless outlet for their sickness? Pedophilia is ****ed up, I'm not saying it's okay by any measure. But if these people feel a need, isn't an animated image infinitely preferable to a real life alternative?

that's not how it works.

for people with deviant obsessions, e.g. pedophilia, exposure increases their desire for consuming more media, and indeed, pursuing a real life alternative. I'm not in a position to give any citations, but I have talked with people who specialize in working with pedophiles and done research on this.

95% of teenagers have switched over to RAP/POP. If your one of the 10% that still listens to REAL MUSIC copy and paste this to your sig.

for people with deviant obsessions, e.g. pedophilia, exposure increases their desire for consuming more media, and indeed, pursuing a real life alternative. I'm not in a position to give any citations, but I have talked with people who specialize in working with pedophiles and done research on this.

I actually agree with Oister in regards to this.

I'll find you the citations if you want them, but a lot of psychology research seems to center around the idea that it's generally healthy for people to find alternative outlets for destructive behavioral patterns.
Like for instance, how people with aggression issues might take great help in practicing full-contact martial arts etc, hitting a pillow and so forth.
There is no reason to assume the same isn't the case when it comes to pedophiles, or other people who suffer from compulsions surrounding deviant sexual behavior.

The only reason you probably won't find research going into that, is because of the enormous backlash you'd face as a researcher if you proposed testing this behavioral theory on pedophiles by having them masturbate to manga, considering ethical guidelines and the nature of common perceptions of pedophilia.
It seems to hold true when it comes to other psychological dispositions like anger management issues, so I see no reason to assume it's somehow completely different when talking about pedophilia.

At the end of the the day - the link between pop-culture influence and human behavior is extremely poor, and insignificant. Majority research doesn't support it, and the little that does has no way of accounting for qualitative difference when you consider the vast majority of consumers whom the media/art products show no noticeable effect on what so ever.

I know that lately, we've had an raise in the surge of media critics, because popular and academic feminists have taken it upon them to make this into an issue the moment media like games and manga/anime became popular enough for them to notice, and that has affected into the idea that we somehow have this new reasonable position about the harmful effects of certain kind of media, when it's really just as bunk as the earlier media and censorship waves that came in the form of religious right-wing family values movements.

Literature, music, movies, and now games, have all in their respective era's been blamed for cultural decline and societal ills, yet consistently, society seems to be completely uninhibited these things if you look at the decreased criminal rates, and increased states of social equity.
It really is a non-issue.
Not even a decade ago, "video games make us violent" was the mantra, and it's been more or less uniformly rejected.

Now that gaming and Japanese nerd-culture has truly stepped into the lime-light, and people who otherwise wouldn't have given a damn finally see what's in it, the new mantra is "games/Japanese manga/anime enables sexually oppressive or deviant behavior and attitudes".
It's the exact same argument. It's the exact same issue.

Nobody who does not already suffer from some sort of mental instability or serious mental illness, is going to construct their reality based on minor pop-culture influences, especially considering the way most of these stories and depictions are completely contrary to the majority of their real life experience - case in point, child abuse is neither ordinary, nor endorsed in any way, in any civilized country I can think of.
In most cases it's severely frowned upon and punishable by law. The majority of children in your immediate surroundings, both as a child and as an adult, are not going to be conforming to the images of some loli manga from your local Japanese convenience store.
They are, most likely, going to be unique individuals with agency and integrity living in an environment that will interfere and try to shut down and punish any behavior from anyone who tries to ruin that.
That reality does not go lost on people just because there exists media and art that conflicts with it - after all, where is the biggest amount of influence likely to happen? In reality, in your everyday life, or in the probably less than 10% of your day time spent reading a manga?

Also, because pedophilia is so poorly understood due to cultural baggage shaping any discourse you might have about it, research based or otherwise, it's problematic to summarize it as a "deviant obsession".
It certainly is a deviant sexual preference, and an unhealthy one at that, but we can't assume to reduce all pedophile-like tendencies into one category.
There is little to suggest that the fundamental mental workings that underpin a pedophile's sexual preference is much different from anyone else, straight, or gay for that matter. It's problematic in nature because it targets children, whom, of course, cannot give meaningful consent. However, with that being said, the actual mechanism controlling for sexual behavior seems to remain the same.

So, with that being said, would you make the argument that a gay person becomes more and more gay, the more they subject themselves to gay culture and gay porn? Presumably not.
How well does complete and utter celibacy work for most people? Not very well.

In terms of normal sexual psychology, and our understanding of sexual expression, everything seems to suggest that it's always better for a person to have a way of expressing their sexuality than not. Sexual frustration is never a good thing, and is a factor that can have serious ramifications on the human psyche in turn, if it isn't dealt with properly.

If you don't consider that a viable method, you're left with judging it a mental disorder, locking them up and drugging them. That's it.
As far as I know, there is currently no consistent method of treatment and reformation method for pedophilia. It's even worse if a person becomes publicly known to suffer from this condition even if they'd never actually acted on it.
Question worth asking in additions is, if a person finds him-/herself exhibiting signs of this condition, but also find themselves being able to live with it without ever actually acting on it(with or without the help of pornography), then should they have to suffer the treatments and heavy medications?

In terms of methodology in analyzing this issue, it's also worth exploring the influence of perception in relation to the media.
After all, manga is drawn, and therefore does not reflect actual individuals.
It isn't unreasonable to postulate the idea that people perceive cartoons differently than they would depictions of actual human beings.
Because drawings are ambiguous, there is room for a lot of project on part of the consumer.

It is conceivable to me, that a person might like loli characters in manga, in still be completely disinterested in actual human children, just as you can find furries (most likely the majority of them in this case)who are completely disinterested in having sex with actual animals.

How do you draw the line?

With all this being said, I am naturally for banning and pursuing child-pornography, and those who produce it. That is a serious social issue, and we should have zero tolerance when it comes it.
The big difference between CP and manga depicting children in violent or sexual situations, is that consent doesn't come into it, since the depicted children in manga don't exist in real life, and that there is no research that establishes causal links between deviant sexual behavior and the consumption of these kinds of manga, and finally, that it might actually help certain people deal with sexual urges they need to alleviate in order to not act on.

At the end of the day, I believe that censorship of any kind should always be the exception to the rule so to speak, and any proposition of censorship needs to go hand-in-hand with some very specific and persuasive arguments that clearly set out why the thing in questions needs to be censored, and why not other types of media or art, so the motion cannot be abused in the future to censor for completely different reasons.
Pushes for censorship are always dangerous, because they're passed on principles, notions like consumer protection over consumer responsibility etc, and that is a very real slippery-slope, because it has been shown time and time again throughout history, to be a political choice that can often be abused by the power-hungry on a later occasion.

If you ban "loli-manga" despite any real points to function as reasons for promoting the ban, that raises the question, why are you banning it?
If you then provide some arbitrary, poorly thought-out reasons to ban it, and those are accepted, then by what standard would you deny a new petition for a ban of something you care about on a later date?

There is also the matter of political context here.
Most of the people who want to comment on this, outside of Japan, have no idea what's going on in Japan at the moment.
Japan is clearly, politically speaking, moving towards the far right in many respects, and this kind of sentiment (art censorship based on cultural sensitivity) is another enabling factor in what might be a rather gray and oppressive future socio-political climate.

First we had this,

On October 25th, 2013, the Japanese Security Council approved Act No. 108 of 2013, “The Special Secrecy Law” [ 特定秘密保護法], officially known as “The Act on Protection of Specified Secrets” [ 特定秘密の保護に関する法律].

The draft for the law was submitted to the National Diet, where it was once again approved on December 6th of the same year, before being promulgated on December 13th.

The law specifies that the Japanese government has the right to designate information as "special secrets" to be kept from the general public as a matter of national interest, with allowances for the persecution, and punishment, of those who would leak, or attempt to leak, sensitive information.

More and more, Japan seems to be regressing socio-politically, and most of it seems to be pushing far right when it comes to social issues(although thankfully, they seems to be going leftwards when it comes to economics which will certainly help the lower middle-class).

The point I am trying to make here, is that people shouldn't be fooled to think that they're taking a part in progressive social justice advocacy by supporting this push.

All you're doing is feeding into the Japanese right-wing compulsive obsessive control-freak issues, by buying into this "family issues" spun political move which is more likely than not, simply another attempt at reining in the masses of the country, by setting a precedent within legal pursuit of censorship that they can abuse on later dates regarding other more important political issue for the state.

Consider whether you want a nation with a “The Special Secrecy Law”, to be able to censor anything at all.

Anyway, that's it for today's public service announcement. Be smart, be safe, and have a good day!

EDIT:I also wanted to say that I am neither a fan, nor even a consumer of the type of media in question, so it's not like I'm making this argument out of self-preservation or something to that effect.
I'm simply extremely dubious of any political motion for censorship of art/media based primarily on concerns of an emotional reactionary nature.